The Jio Phone brought a new marketing tactic to the budget smartphone segment — «effective price». This has spurred rivals to do the same and we now have several such offers floating around. From Micromax Bharat 1 to the Karbonn A40 Indian, there are quite a few of these phones available at rather low «effective» prices. Is there more of a cost associated to these phones than what marketing materials reveal? Jio Phone experts Aditya Shenoy and Rishi Alwani join host Pranay Parab to discuss.

This episode begins with talk about the Jio Phone and the fine print associated with that. We talk about how all these rivals have joined the bandwagon too. We discuss three other phones and the offers they provide in detail. We talk about Vodafone and Micromax tying up to launch a phone with an effective price of Rs. 999, Airtel and Karbonn partnering to launch a 4G smartphone at an effective price of Rs. 1,399, apart from BSNL’s tie-up with Micromax to launch a feature phone.

Then the comparisons begin. We compare the price, specifications, and features of the Vodafone Micromax Bharat-2 Ultra, Jio Phone, Airtel Karbonn A40 Indian, and BSNL Micromax Bharat-1. This marks the move of the discussion to all the fine print in each of these «deals». Rishi and Aditya ask some rather pointed questions that these companies need to answer and wonder whether people should buy any of these phones at all.

That’s all for this week’s episode of Orbital, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, or just hit the play button below.